A community of volunteers who share their knowledge, and answer your tech questions. Register now to gain access to all of our features, it's FREE and only takes one minute.
Once registered and logged in, you will be able to create topics, post replies to existing threads, give reputation to your fellow members, get your own private messenger, post status updates, manage your profile and so much more. This message, and all ads will be removed once you have signed in.

Hi trackstar1128 and welcome to the WTT forums.
Sorry to hear about the problem with your computer.... if the boot screen is the genuine HP one and you have tried all the other suggestions then "restoring to factory" may be a wise move;

I don't want to return it to factory shipped because I have stuff I don't want to lose. What can I do?

If its programs /applications that you dont want to lose just reinstall them from your set up dics or downloaded executables once you have restored to factory...if its docs music videos etc then just use your latest back up to put them back.
If you have made a disc image using either windows native tools or a paid for 3rd party product like Acronis, Paragon, Symantec etc(or one of the many free disc imaging applications) then it won't take long to reimage so you are up and running again in double quick time...
If for some reason you didn't take a disc image and your latest backup doesn't include the stuff you need, then the 2 quickest options you can consider are:

1 Use a Live Linux disc (Linux Puppy is good) boot into puppy and copy off your important files to external USB hard drive or Flash drive etc
Linux Puppy available here:http://www.puppylinux.com/
alternatively:

2 Remove your hard drive and put it in a USB caddy and access the files via any other computer, or just "slave" your old hard drive to a different machine and copy the files off that way
Post back if you need any clarification or explanations.
Regards
paws

Can you explain how the puppy thing works? I will burn it to a CD then put it into the laptop that does not work and have it boot from cd first? Then what? I'm wondering that since my laptop is not booting at all, will it be a problem for me to access puppy?

Yes the link you provided here:http://www.techsuppo...ter-574044.html
is always worth trying to see if this will do the trick, but I thought you had already tried that and found that the only thing you could get to was the HP recovery screen..

As long as your hardware is Ok then Puppy should boot just fine.... it will run entirely within RAM (it doesn;t need your hard drive to be able to boot.... and it doesn't need Windows.....but will allow you to access your hard drive (as long as the drive itself hasn't failed) and allow you to copy your stuff to USB driv/Flash drive/memory stick

One thing to remember is that you must burn the Linux Live Puppy as an image...just copying the file wont work..
If you use imgBurn to do the job you won't go far wrong:
Available here:http://www.imgburn.com/
Regards
paws

Yes this works well, as long as its a relatively modern machine with a BIOS that allows booting from USB...(most do these days) but if your computer is really ancient then best wait until you can get hold of a CD to burn...
Regards
paws

To use a bootable USB flash though, your PC BIOS must have USB as a boot option.
The workaround for this on an older PC without a USB boot option would be to use a floppy and set the floppy as a boot option.
With a puppy floppy, there is a "wake-puppy" command line option.

0 user(s) are reading this topic

About What the Tech

Tom (Coyote) Wilson started this site as TomCoyote.org in 2002. Along with SpywareInfo, it was one of the first places to offer online malware removal training in its Classroom. Cluster headaches forced retirement of Tom in 2007, and the site was renamed "What the Tech". Free malware removal help and training has remained a constant.